Chapter 8 The Ferry at Filmer Island

The ferry hold was empty when they opened it, and cleaner than a hold had any right to be. Vail stood on the slip above the door with the flashlight down into the dark and read the floor the way he read the bank. The drain was clear. The coil was clear. The walls had been washed, recently and hard, and the smell of bleach sat over the smell of old fish like a lie over a truth. "Someone cleaned this week," he said. "Someone cleans a fish hold in November, in the ice season, when the boat's on the slip and there's nothing to clean for." Runa climbed down and stood beside him. "Where does Marnie live?" "On the island, past the landing." They walked to the house at dusk, past a woodpile stacked to the eaves and a set of tire tracks in the dooryard that had frozen in the shape of the last vehicle to leave it. Vail photographed the tracks without saying why. Marnie let them in and did not act surprised to see them again. She put the kettle on and sat at the table with her hands around her cup, and she listened while Vail told her what they had found in the box. When he was done she was quiet for a long time. "You found the decoys," she said at last. "We found the decoys, and we found the sweater that matches the wool under Muir's hands." Vail set the photographs on the table, one after another, the way he set cards. "Marnie, I have to ask you a question and I need the true answer." "Ask it." "Where were you the night the ice took Corwin Muir?" She looked at the photographs and then at him, and her old eyes were steady. "Here," she said. "In this kitchen. My granddaughter sat with me till ten, and my son came by in the morning, and if you want them, you can have their names. I did not go to the Keld that night and I did not clean that hold. I haven't run the boat since the ice came." "Somebody used your hold." "Somebody has the key to the slip gate and the yard, and it isn't only me." She stood and went to a nail by the door and lifted a ring of keys off it and set it on the table. "The authority keeps a set, on account of the Traverse. If you want to know who can walk onto this island and open my hold and my gate, Sergeant, it's the marker crew. It's been the marker crew for twelve years. Everyone knows it." Vail looked at the ring of keys on the table and did not touch it. A key is a promise that a door can be opened, and he had learned this month that the door was the least of it, because the door had opened on a clean hold and a clear drain and an absence, and an absence is the hardest kind of evidence to carry into a room and lay on a table. There was nothing on paper that said a woman had cleaned a fish hold in November. There was only the bleach in the air and the bare floor and the fact of a room that had not needed cleaning and had been cleaned anyway. "The marker crew," Vail said. "Ragna Sund's crew." "Six people on the crew and every one of them can open the ferry gate," Runa said. "So the crew is a list of names and the names are a wall. We can prove access and prove nothing with it." "That is the shape of this whole case," Vail said. "Every road leads to a door that half the town can open. Whoever is doing this has spent twenty years learning to be one of the half." "Ivar's widow." Marnie sat back down. "She comes out to the island every November to set the first markers on the Traverse, and she brings the whole crew, four or five men and her, and they stay the day. And every one of them can open that gate." Runa was writing fast. "Do you know the crew names?" "I know them because I've fed them." Marnie poured the tea. "But you'll want to ask the authority for the roster, not a woman who makes them soup." They took the roster request back to town and filed it, and on the way Vail did not go to the station. He drove instead to the bluff, to Brekke's warm house, and stood on the porch a while before he knocked. They walked back to the car past the slip and the hauled ferry, and Vail stopped at the hold door and put his hand on the cold steel and did not open it, because the techs had photographed it and the lab had swabbed it and there was nothing left to see. He stood there anyway, in the failing light, and thought about a man kept in a fish hold at the end of an island where nobody came between November and April, warmed and cooled and warmed again while the river outside his door did what the river did. Brekke opened the door and looked at his face and let him in without a word. "The crew," Vail said. "The marker crew on the Traverse. Which of them knew Ivar?" "All of them knew Ivar." Brekke sat down among his orchids. "But only one of them married him. And only one of them has spent twenty years with the gauge schedule in her hand and the river in her blood and a husband the water never gave back." "You've thought about this." "I've thought about nothing else for four years." Brekke looked up. "You want to ask me if she did it. I'll tell you what I think, and then you'll tell me it isn't evidence, and you'll be right, and it won't change what I think." "Tell me." "She did it," Brekke said. "And if she did, you're the only man alive she'd want to take alive. She's been saving you, Soren. Not out of mercy. Because you're the one who can still write it down." Vail did not answer him. He stood among the orchids and looked out at the reservoir and thought about how everyone who had ever touched this case had known the shape of it for years and done nothing, including the man in the chair and the man standing by the window, and how a small town is not a place where secrets live, it is a place where everyone agrees not to be the first to say them. He had been one of those everyone for twenty years. He was not going to be one of them for the fifth winter. Outside, the snow came on. Down at the Keld, the river kept its one mouth open, and the ice around it thickened a little more with every hour of the cold, and somewhere in the dark a woman with a gauge in her hand and a husband under the ice watched the number climb toward the night when the river would take whatever she gave it. Vail sat in the car at the landing with the engine running and the ferry dark on its slip and thought about a woman he had known by sight for thirty years and had never once suspected of anything, which is the only way a crime survives in a small town. He had been wrong about the water for twenty years. He was not going to be wrong about the women on this island because one of them had given him tea and turned out to be kind. ---